This is the most comprehensive site that documents both the history of Bohemia from 1848 through 1920s, as well as the current Bohemia of today. Here you may view the best videos and art and conduct art historical research on this artworld phenomenon. Bohemia is a state without borders. Bohemia is a state of mind; an alternative world where cunning and artfullness are merged in a perfect amalgamation of survival and adaptability.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Greenwhich Village: The First Bohemia

The Great Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay

New York's first Bohemia was Greenwhich Village in the 1910s, when everyone from Edna St. Vincent Millay to John Sloan made "the Village" their hangout. It became so hip that by the 1920s the Bohemian era was over, due to rising rents and new luxury apartment buildings...until the next disaffected generation took up the Village's mantra of non-conformism. Achitectural historian Barry Lewis will be giving this lecture and slide show.

Look for me, I will be attending and I hope to meet some new friends there who share my enthusiasm for 'La Boheme.' -CVS

Edna St. Vincent Millay.Sunbathers On Roof, etching, 1941 by John Sloan.The Hell Hole, etching and aqcuatint, 8" x 10", by John Sloan

The Hell Hole was Tom Wallace's bar, The Golden Swan, located on the corner of Sixth Ave and 4th Street. It was the habitue of many artists, actors and writers. Now the location is the site of the Golden Swan Gardens.

About Me

The famous anarchist and art critic Felix Feneon lived a double life for many years. He earned his bread as an employee of the French Department of War, all the while writing for the major Parisian anarchist newspapers of the day, until the government hawks caught up with him and fired him. There are many examples of bohemians who have infiltrated bourgeois society and earned their bread as public officials, men and women who turn their true individualist natures on and off like a light as the report to and depart their government posts. I also take pride in my ability to live a double life, in fact, I feel I have perfected the art of "undercover bohemianism". Charles Baudelaire said the poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, that he can be at once himself and someone else." My life is a series of binary oppositions. I am an artist and an aesthete on the one hand, and I am a military veteran and a police sergeant on the other. I earn my bread as a police supervisor (and police work can be noble and meaningful when done correctly to protect the innocent and suppress the dishonest and dirty), but being an artist defines who I am and gives me my worthy purpose to live for. I live a double life with bohemianism in my soul and austerity on the outside. As an artist, I realized that to survive in a police milieu it would be necessary to know how to disguise my nature well and to live two contradictory lives; as a cop, I have to put on a spit and polished personal surface and take on the trappings of the grey, disciplined, boring, regimented para-military existence. A false surface that would cover up my colorful, imaginative, free artistic true nature. I had to accomodate to the regimented workplace environment. Machiavelli stated in The Prince: "...everyone sees what you appear to be, few touch upon what you are." At work, while on duty, people only see a shadow; my true self, which no one suspects, is elsewhere. Likewise, as an artist I leave the cop behind. Sometimes my two worlds conflict and interfere with one another and at othertimes they feed off one another (as you can see in my fingerprint ink drawings done on official police and F.B.I. fingerprint cards). I tried to live my life in unison with my art without success and have learned that while on duty, I have to be disciplined, austere, serious, authoritative, adhering completely to social conventions. Police are immersed in the corruptions of society, a society that has prostituted its soul; politics, the excrement of that society, interferes daily in police operations (and as an artistic-individualist I have come to the conclusion that the only good government for an artist to live freely under is no government at all- the artworld is a world without borders).When I'm off-duty, and enter into my art world, which is a world in which every day is a feast day for me, I bring forth my supreme efforts of my soul to withdraw from the corruptions of society, develop my intellect to its full maximum creative and individual power, liberate myself from the mundane, ordinary existence and live in my own mental universe- a universe created by my own imagination. This artistic self-intoxication is what keeps me sane. Police work is the most uncreative environment and we deal with people when they are at their worst. Cops often become steeped in negative attitudes, their lives become stultified, uncreative and pessimistic. Art on the other hand is a world of endless possibilities; A creative force in the world. The artworld is where I attempt to escape the shadows of ordinary existence and the restrictive boundaries of time. So, I have learned to turn both lives on and off like a light switch. Henri Muger said it best : "...It would suffice for them to make a few concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread." I have come to realize that the current system of capitalism, whether the capitalism is within a government that is democratic, communist or facist, is a system that exploits and enslaves the working class humanbeings. I know I am, like all are, a slave to the economic system- a crank on a machine that gets thrown on a junk heap after rusting and is replaced with shiney new parts. I create art as a form of liberation. I paint and create to liberate myself. Art is the only true path to individualism and liberation. Artists are the truest form of free individualists the world has ever known. All power to the imagination!